Whispers

His speed was down to forty miles an hour, and he got it back up to sixty. He decided not to push it beyond that. He only had a short distance to go. If he wrapped the Jeep around a streetlamp or rolled it over and killed himself, he wouldn't be able to do Hilary any good.

He was still not obeying the rules of the road. He went much too fast and wide on what few turns there were, swinging out into the east-bound lanes, again thankful that there were no oncoming cars. The traffic signals were all against him, a perverse twist of fate, but he ignored every one of them. He wasn't worried about getting a ticket for speeding or reckless driving. If stopped, he would flash his badge and take the uniformed officers along with him to Hilary's place. But he hoped to God he wasn't given a chance to pick up those reinforcements, for it would mean stopping, identifying himself, and explaining the emergency. If they pulled him over, he would lose at least a minute.

He had a hunch that a minute might be the difference between life and death for Hilary.

***

As she watched Bruno Frye coming through the archway, Hilary thought she must be losing her mind.

The man was dead. Dead! She had stabbed him twice, had seen his blood. She had seen him in the morgue, too, cold and yellow-gray and lifeless. An autopsy had been performed. A death certificate had been signed. Dead men don't walk. Nevertheless, he was back from the grave, walking out of the dark dining room, the ultimate uninvited guest, a large knife in one gloved hand, eager to finish what he had started last week; and it simply was not possible that he could be there.

Hilary closed her eyes and willed him to be gone. But a second later, when she forced herself to look again, he was still there.

She was unable to move. She wanted to run, but all of her joints--hips, knees, ankles--were rigid, locked, and she didn't have the strength to make them move. She felt weak, as frail as an old, old woman; she was sure that, if she somehow managed to unlock her joints and take a step, she would collapse.

She couldn't speak, but, inside, she was screaming.

Frye stopped less than fifteen feet from her, one foot in a cotton snowdrift of stuffing that had been torn from one of the ruined armchairs. He was pasty-faced, shaking violently, obviously on the edge of hysteria.

Could a dead man be hysterical?

She had to be out of her mind. Had to be. Stark raving mad. But she knew she wasn't.

A ghost? But she didn't believe in ghosts. And besides, wasn't a spirit supposed to be insubstantial, transparent, or at least translucent? Could an apparition be as solid as this walking dead man, as convincingly and terrifyingly real as he was?

"Bitch," he said. "You stinking bitch!"

His hard, low-pitched, gravelly voice was unmistakable.

But, Hilary thought crazily, his vocal cords already should have started to rot. His throat should be blocked with putrescence.

She felt high-pitched laughter building in her, and she struggled to control it. If she began to laugh, she might never stop.

"You killed me," he said menacingly, still teetering on the brink of hysteria.

"No," she said. "Oh, no. No."

"You did!" he screamed, brandishing the knife. "You killed me! Don't lie about it. I know. Don't you think I know? Oh, Jesus! I feel so strange, so alone, all alone, so empty." There was genuine spiritual agony mixed up with his rage. "So empty and scared. And it's all because of you."

He slowly crossed the few yards that separated him from her, stepping carefully through the rubble.

Hilary could see that this dead man's eyes were not blank or filmed with milky cataracts. These eyes were blue-gray and very much alive--and brimming with cold, cold anger.

"This time you'll stay dead," Frye said as he approached. "You won't come back this time."

She tried to retreat from him, took one hesitant step, and her legs almost buckled. But she didn't fall. She had more strength left than she had thought.

"This time," Frye said, "I'm taking every precaution. I'm not giving you a chance to come back.

I'm going to cut your fuckin' heart out."

She took another step, but it didn't matter; she could not escape. She wouldn't have time to reach the door and throw off both locks. If she tried that, he would be on her in a second, ramming the knife down between her shoulders.

"Pound a stake through your fuckin' heart."

If she ran for the stairs and tried to get to the pistol in her bedroom, she surely wouldn't be as lucky as she had been the last time. This time he would catch her before she made it to the second floor.

"I'll cut your goddamned head off."

He loomed over her, within arm's reach.

She had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

"Gonna cut out your tongue. Stuff your fuckin' mouth full of garlic. Stuff it full of garlic so you can't sweet-talk your way back from hell."

She could hear her own thunderous heartbeat. She couldn't breathe because of the intensity of her fear.

"Cut your fuckin' eyes out."

She froze again, unable to move an inch.

"Gonna cut your eyes out and crush them so you can't see your way back."

Frye raised the knife high above his head. "Cut your hands off so you can't feel your way back from hell."

The knife hung up there for an eternity as terror distorted Hilary's sense of time. The wicked point of the weapon drew her gaze, nearly hypnotizing her.

"No!"

Sharp slivers of light glinted on the cutting edge of the poised blade.

"Bitch."

And then the knife started down, straight at her face, light flashing off the steel, down and down and down in a long, smooth, murderous arc.

She was holding the bag of groceries in one arm. Now, without pausing to think about what she must do, in one quick and instinctive move, she grabbed the bag with both hands and thrust it out, up, in the way of the descending knife, trying desperately to block the killing blow.

The blade rammed through the groceries, puncturing a carton of milk.

Frye roared in fury.

The dripping bag was knocked out of Hilary's grasp. It fell to the floor, spilling milk and eggs and scallions and sticks of butter.

The knife had been torn from the dead man's hand. He stopped to retrieve it.

Hilary ran toward the stairs. She knew that she had only delayed the inevitable. She had gained two or three seconds, no more than that, not nearly enough time to save herself.

The doorbell rang.

Surprised, she stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked back.

Frye stood up with the knife in hand.

Their eyes met; Hilary could see a flicker of indecision in his.

Frye moved toward her, but with less confidence than he had exhibited before. He glanced nervously toward the foyer and the front door.

The bell rang again.

Holding on to the bannister, backing up the steps, Hilary yelled for help, screamed at the top of her voice.

Outside, a man shouted: "Police!"

It was Tony.

"Police! Open this door!"

Hilary couldn't imagine why he had come. She had never been so glad to hear anyone's voice as she was to hear his, now.

Frye stopped when he heard the word "police," looked up at Hilary, then at the door, then at her again, calculating his chances.

She kept screaming.

Glass exploded with a bang that caused Frye to jump in surprise, and sharp pieces rang discordantly on a tile floor. Although she couldn't see into the foyer from her position on the steps, Hilary knew that Tony had smashed the narrow window beside the front door.

"Police!"

Frye glared at her. She had never seen such hatred as that which twisted his face and gave his eyes a mad shine.

"Hilary!" Tony said.

"I'll be back," Frye told her.

The dead man turned away from her and ran across the living room, toward the dining room, apparently intending to slip out of the house by way of the kitchen.

Sobbing, Hilary dashed down the few steps she had climbed. She rushed to the front door, where Tony was calling her through the small broken windowpane.

***

Holstering his service revolver, Tony returned from the rear lawn, stepped into the brightly-lit kitchen.

Hilary was standing by the utility island in the center of the room. There was a knife on the counter, inches from her right hand.

As he closed the door he said, "There's no one in the rose garden."

"Lock it," she said.

"What?"

"The door. Lock it."

He locked it.

"You looked everywhere?" she asked.

"Every corner."

"Along both sides of the house?"

"Yes."

"In the shrubbery?"

"Every bush."

"Now what?" she asked.

"I'll call in to HQ, get a couple of uniforms out here to write up a report."

"It won't do any good," she said.

"You never can tell. A neighbor might have seen someone lurking here earlier. Or maybe somebody spotted him running away."

"Does a dead man have to run away? Can't a ghost just vanish when it wants to?"

"You don't believe in ghosts?"

"Maybe he wasn't a ghost," she said. "Maybe he was a walking corpse. Just your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill walking corpse."

"You don't believe in zombies, either."

"Don't I?"

"You're too level-headed for that."

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I don't know what I believe any more."

Her voice contained a tremor that disturbed him. She was on the verge of a collapse.

"Hilary ... are you sure of what you saw?"

"It was him."

"But how could it be?"

"It was Frye," she insisted.

"You saw him in the morgue last Thursday."

"Was he dead then?"

"Of course he was dead."

"Who said?"

"The doctors. Pathologists."

"Doctors have been known to be wrong."

"About whether or not a person is dead?"

"You read about it in the papers every once in a while," she said. "They decide a man has kicked the bucket; they sign the death certificate; and then the deceased suddenly sits up on the undertaker's table. It happens. Not often. I admit it's not an everyday occurrence. I know it's pretty much a one in a million kind of thing."

"More like one in ten million."

"But it does happen."

"Not in this case."

"I saw him! Here. Right here. Tonight."

He went to her, kissed her on the cheek, took her hand, which was ice-cold. "Listen, Hilary, he's dead. Because of the stab wounds you inflicted, Frye lost half the blood in his body. They found him in a huge pool of it. He lost all that blood, and then he lay in the hot sun, unattended, for a few hours. He simply couldn't have lived through that."

"Maybe he could."

Tony lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her pale fingers. "No," he said quietly but firmly. "Frye would have had to die from such a blood loss."

Tony figured that she was suffering from mild shock, which was somehow responsible for a temporary short circuit of her senses, a brief confusion of memories. She just was getting this attack mixed up with the one last week. In a minute or two, when she regained control of herself, everything would clear up in her mind, and she would realize that the man who had been here tonight had not been Bruno Frye. All he had to do was stroke her a little bit, speak to her in a measured voice, and answer all her questions and wild suppositions as reasonably as possible, until she was her normal self again.

"Maybe Frye wasn't dead when they found him in that supermarket parking lot," she said. "Maybe he was just in a coma."

"The coroner would have discovered it when he did the autopsy."

"Maybe he didn't do the autopsy."

"If he didn't, another doctor on his staff did."

"Well," Hilary said, "maybe they were especially busy that day--a lot of bodies all at once or something like that--and they decided just to fill out a quick report without actually doing the work."

"Impossible," Tony said. "The medical examiner's office has the highest professional standards imaginable."

"Can't we at least check on it?" she asked.

He nodded. "Sure. We can do that. But you're forgetting that Frye must have passed through the hands of at least one mortician. Probably two. What little blood was left in him must have been drained out and replaced with embalming fluid."

"Are you sure?"

"He had to be either embalmed or cremated to be shipped to St. Helena. It's the law."

She considered that for a moment, then said, "But what if this is one of those bizarre cases, the one in ten million? What if he was mistakenly pronounced dead? What if the coroner did fudge on the autopsy? And what if Frye sat up on the embalmer's table, just as the mortician was starting to work on him?"

"You're grasping at straws, Hilary. Surely you can see that if anything like that happened, we'd know about it. If a mortician found himself in possession of a dead body that turned out not to be dead after all, that turned out to be a virtually bloodless man urgently in need of medical attention, then that mortician would get him to the nearest hospital in one hell of a hurry. He'd also call the coroner's office. Or the hospital would call. We'd know about it immediately."

She thought about what he had said. She stared at the kitchen floor and chewed on her lower lip.

Finally, she said, "What about Sheriff Laurenski up there in Napa County?"

"We haven't been able to get a response out of him yet."

"Why not?"

"He's dodging our inquiries. He won't take our calls or return them.

"Well, doesn't that tell you that there's more to this than meets the eye?" she asked. "There's some sort of conspiracy, and the Napa sheriff is part of it."

"What sort of conspiracy did you have in mind?"

"I ... don't know."

Still speaking softly and calmly, still certain that she would eventually respond to his gentle and reasonable arguments, Tony said, "A conspiracy between Frye and Laurenski and maybe even Satan himself? A conspiracy to cheat Death out of his due? An evil conspiracy to come back from the grave? A conspiracy to somehow live forever? None of that makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?"